Yesterday, @chrisabad and his team unleashed the new game Spy Master into the twitterverse public eye. It’s getting some very mixed reviews; some love the game and are playing it right now while others are telling their users to stop tweeting them to join. Techcrunch is on the story too, reporting on the insane SpyMaster backlash.

I was curious when I got my first invitation to play the game so I joined, I had to at least check it out right?!

I was very nervous that I was going to lose good followers because I’d heard about the game play spam. I have always done my best to be a useful and perhaps even entertaining tweet stream to follow and I know there are plenty of you that have absolutely no interest in playing the game. You certainly don’t want to hear about it 100 times a day from everyone you follow - frankly neither do I.

I do believe there is a way to play the game and not annoy the hell out of your followers every day. You have instant control over what you tweet out from the game simply by clicking the link located at the bottom right of every page “Notification Settings”. You can literally turn off ALL tweets the game would send and never bother your followers at all!

If you are already a hardcore SpyMaster player, you’re probably thinking you will lose those valuable cash % increases if you turn them all off, but I’m here to tell you there is a way around even that! You see when I’m playing I simply change the settings as I play different areas of the game to stop my out bound tweets - and still maintain a 5%-6% increase at all times. If I’m going to try and buy equipment at the “Black Market” I first make a stop at the notification settings, turn off that particular tweet setting and turn on the others.

The only other argument for tweet spamming the game is to gain more SpyMasters as they are called (followers that are also playing the game). I’d argue you will have a much better success rate by manually selecting just a handful of followers you’ve grown a relationship with and invite them individually. It increases actual participation and doesn’t annoy the hundreds of other people that have no interest in the game itself.

I’m still playing the game and I’m now a level 9 CIA spy, so far I’m still enjoying it.  I haven’t heard of anyone that is no longer a follower due to my game play, but then the only game tweets I’ve ever allowed to be sent out were when I level up (and not all of those either). So if you are a player - enjoy the game, Follow Me to grow your game network AND be conscious of clogging up your followers twitter streams. If you aren’t you may find your followers have decided following you is more annoying than enjoyable - Good Bye!.

Tags: #SpyMaster, API, Game, Spy Master, twitter

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 31st, 2009 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Blog, Social Media, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.